Food production overwhelming climare change abatement efforts

Each year our terrestrial biosphere absorbs about a quarter of all the carbon dioxide emissions that humans produce. This a very good thing; it helps to moderate the warming produced by human activities such as burning fossil fuels and cutting down forests.

But in a paper published in Nature today, we show that emissions from other human activities, particularly food production, are overwhelming this cooling effect. This is a worrying trend, at a time when CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels are slowing down, and is clearly not consistent with efforts to stabilise global warming well below 2℃ as agreed at the Paris climate conference.

Read the piece by CSIRO Senior Principal Research Scientist and Executive Director of the Global Carbon Project, Pep Canadell, and the Director of the International Center for Climate and Global Change Research, Auburn University, Hanqin Tian, on The Converation -  “Global food production threatens to overwhelm efforts to combat climate change.”